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Subsidiarity in her/his own sphere;

Women and Christian politics1

Abstract

This article is a discussion of the attitude of Christian social thought to women. In 1891 two influential Christian documents addressed this issue. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Abraham Kuyper’s Het Sociaale Vraagstuk der Christelijke Religie were responses to industrialization and subsequent Christian responses to feminism have had to face the legal, cultural and political aspects of the enhanced female participation in commerce which assumes equality for all consumers in the market-place. Catholic and Protestant political initiatives in Europe in the early 20th century in line with these two approaches assumed that the vocation of Christian women, inside and outside the domestic sphere, is to be that of bulwark against materialism and liberalism. In line with this point of view they helped to counter the domination of market-place values over all spheres of social life. These documents are also part of latter-day efforts to reconsider women’s place. Female involvement in industry and public life around the world increases unabated as “affirmative action” re-structures the public status of women. The ambiguous legacy of “economic rationalism” poses new threats since the burden of social welfare falls again onto the shoulders of overworked women. A sociological account which would be Christian, must address historical, social and economic ambiguities. This article explores the issue, noting typical ways in which these two prominent Christian contributions will be interpreted.

• 1. The importance of the issue

This article explores feminism’s challenge to Christian democratic thinking of both Roman

Catholic and Reformed traditions. The under-development in biblically-directed Christian

democratic politics and reflection in countries like USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia

and New Zealand, requires careful analysis. It might have something to do with the fact

that the “women’s issue” remains unresolved in Christian political thought. Whether this

under-development can be challenged remains to be seen, but if Christian politics is to

emerge then the challenge of feminism has to be met and the normative role for women in

post-industrial society made plain. The under-development of Christian politics in these

countries is linked spiritually to the dominance of utilitarian, communitarian and

pragmatistic visions of civil society which have nourished feminism. The feminist challenge

has provided ongoing support for moral, industrial and political changes which are viewed

now as essential to women’s role.

The remnants of Christian democratic thinking around the world claim to promote a fully

participative multi-cultural civil society. There are large questions about Christian

democracy as a political and cultural movement and some of these concerns centre on

whether it has faced the gendered bi-unity of its own normative vision – God created

humankind, male and female and they are to exercise stewardship over the development of

the planet, from one generation to the next, as partners.

1 Paper originally given at SSSR Annual Meeting October 1995. St Louis, Missouri. A version was subsequently

published in Koers 64(1) 1999 April pp. 19-40

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Such a vision seems decisive enough, having a clear and definite view of contentious

“body” issues like family policy, the legal status of marriage, abortion, euthanasia,

surrogacy and gay rights. But somehow the issues get muddied. Here I wish to limit

discussion to the question of how women’s public office-bearing should be viewed in a

Christian way.

Paul poetically insisted that (the office of) woman was to be saved through child-birth,

namely with the birth of a Saviour (1 Timothy 2:15). This view has not always tied the

Christian church to a male-centred idea of ministry (diaconia or latreia) or excluded women

from contributing fully to the ongoing sanctification of the entire people of God. But

Christian thought has found it difficult to fully accept the office of woman, the vocation of

motherhood, and the other competencies, talents and responsibilities which women

legitimately hold. In this article I discuss these demands upon Christian political reflection

against the backdrop of important themes in neo-Calvinistic and Roman Catholic thought.

Undeveloped Christian politics and a reactionary posture about women’s role may be two

sides of the same coin.

Reformed people, when they have constituted sizeable sectors within national populations

in the last 200 years, have not found it easy to articulate biblical principles for their political

life. Time and again, the advocates of a Reformed world-view, whether in the Netherlands,

South Africa or even Hungary, have not always been in a position to articulate a

distinctively Christian vision, as they face the diversity of cultures and ethnicities in their

national contexts. After all they also inherit their own ethnic characteristics. And in the

push and pull of politics religious commitment sometimes becomes confused with ethnicity.

In the late 20th century, neo-Calvinist political reflection in South Africa has deepened its

insight into how the application of the principle of sphere sovereignty could not mean the

sovereignty of races in their own spheres. The attempt to extend the principle to race

relations, accommodating the sphere sovereignty principle with an idea that ethnicity

always divides civil society into mutually exclusive camps, is now totally discredited. In

such a public-legal order the various camps have to have been divided in a public legal

sense from the outset. How could that be done without one ethnic camp asserting its

sovereignty in matters of the administration of public law? The problem with apartheid

was not with the search (misguided as it is now seen to be) for a legislative way to respect

the integrity of different cultures. Rather the problem was with trying to harness the need

for such civil respect into a public legal division, on ethnic lines, and in which one racial

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group had to govern the boundaries by developing laws which maintained the ethnic

demarcation. Hence when law-making and administration is located on one side of such a

legal (ethnic) division it has the effect of allowing one (ethnic) group to control the public

(and increasingly ethnically circumscribed) lives of those on the other side of the racial

boundary.

Similarly, when we look carefully at the history of Christian politics in the 20th century, we

can find well-intentioned Christian attempts to extend the sphere sovereignty principle to

gender, to the relations between male and female in civil society. Such applications of the

sphere sovereignty principle to relations between men and women, whether in church, state,

family and business, might come with loud affirmations that each gender is sovereign in its

own sphere. It sounds neat. Men and boys will look after male business; women and girls

will attend to female affairs. But who is to administer the boundaries, and who is to define

what the boundaries are?

In post-industrial society the question of women’s place is now a constant theme of political

reflection world-wide. The issue was raised initially by utilitarian feminists, following Mary

Wollstonecraft (1792) and John Stuart Mill (1869), but Christian political reflection cannot

avoid the issue.

• 2. Christianity and feminist social theory

If, as feminist thought concludes, the domestic realm, the sphere of women, is a constructed

invention of the 19th century, then the corollary is also true: the public realm where men

work is also an historical construction. Yet is social reality always so simple that it can be

captured by such neat (post-modern) philosophical formulae? The work of Jean Bethke

Elshtain on families and communities (Elshtain, 1982; 1986; 1990; 1993; 1996), along with

others (Glendon, 1987, 1991; Glendon & Yanes, 1991), highlight the way rights talk functions

as a trump card in social contestation. The trump does not only refer to public policy but

also to the way we write history (Conway, 1994).

Nurseries, hospitals, orphanages, schools have long been important social institutions that

presuppose ongoing female support. There are also important historical examples of

women’s educational institutions at all levels (Conway, 1994). Such action (often in

obedience to the Gospel) did not require women to wait until men gave their permission.

These tasks were taken up because no-one was taking them seriously and were sometimes

efforts by women for women seeking justice for ignored causes. Mission agencies in many

denominations have been run in this way for many decades. The question is not only why

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such involvement is so often ignored. It is also why such important public work does not

become a precedent for further female involvement in adjacent spheres. The answer is

complex and has to do with the fact that such initiatives were not in the first instance a

matter of the political rights of the women themselves, even if such work involved intense

political struggle. The historiographies which illustrate how women overcame the

domestication or privatisation of their social roles should also account for the fact that

women are often seen as a domesticating and civilising influence upon the barbarisms of

public life. This misses the point.

Around the world official statistics indicate alarming rates of marriage failure and the

widespread disruption to households. Any Christian democratic policy-making will need

to appreciate these social trends, and explain why marriage and family life are so unstable.

What does the large incidence of divorce and single-parent households indicate? Is it purely

part of an inevitable process overthrowing an all-pervasive patriarchy? Christian

democratic reflection need not shy away from developing its own critique of feminist

ideology as it encourages a re-newed normative form of familial and household life. But it

will need to better understand the various streams of feminism and how they view these

same trends.

In the same year, 1891, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Abraham Kuyper’s Het sociaale

vraagstuk der Christelijke religie were published as explanations of how and why social life

was being transformed in a non-Christian direction. Waves of feminism and feminisation

confronted the domestic and private lives of Christians on a daily basis with the

consequences of legislation and commercial and industrial practices grounded in liberal,

laissez-faire and utilitarian views. One hundred years later we might judge that their

insights lacked Christian depth, but we should not underestimate the differences in social

context which Christian men and women then had to face as they worked out their

discipleship in civil society.

Following Elshtain, the respective visions of Leo and Kuyper may have been grounded on

“the presumption that authority must be single in form if a society is to be coherent and

orderly” (Elshtain, 1990:51). Both explanations, as Christian rallying calls, insisted that

marriage and family had to be a necessary part of any Christian democratic policy-making.

The major doctrines in these statements have been widely accepted, ensuring that from

thenceforth the internal life of both structures has been considered by Christians as a public

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and political issue (Browning, 1994). The law about these so-called private spheres is always

of a public character with wide-ranging consequences.

Christian democratic social theory, after Leo XIII and Kuyper, may not easily acquiesce in

the paternalism which was part of the 19th century liberalism. To take that route would be

to take issue with the Christian principles basic to these respective political visions.

Together and/or separately they promote systematic Christian social theory, aiming to give

an account of societal plurality and complexity.

When Christian social theory now reassesses the female role in relation to societal plurality

and complexity, the application of subsidiarity and/or sphere sovereignty will necessarily

come to play a part.

• 3. The Christian response to the industrial revolution

These responses to late-19th century industrialism, had everything to do with the Christian

suspicion of liberalism and individualism. For both it was a sine qua non that rationalistic

individualism, along with its humanist manifestations in science and scholarship, were

fruit of the (French) revolutionary impulse. In the Dutch case, the rejection of individualism

was publicly promulgated against what was perceived to be the tide of history. Both Dutch

Catholics and Dutch Calvinists were highly suspicious of the social reform championed by

the Liberals. Yet their united response to universal suffrage seems to have identified that

policy change with the philosophical basis the Liberals and others adopted in their public

campaigns to win women the right to vote.

In reaction to individualism, the Christian critics of such policies tended to fall into

organicist viewpoints which, in time, became part of fascism (Kuyper’s son was associated

with the Dutch national socialist movement) and racism (Kuyper’s philosophy was

conscripted to give support for apartheid). There is an aspect of such neo-Calvinist thinking

which in principle quite clearly failed as Christian thinking.

Likewise the later Papal association with fascism seems to have allowed the principle of

subsidiarity to function as an ecclesiastical blindfold to unjust policies. Organic and

communitarian views are not as world-changing as many imply. According to Mary

Stewart van Leeuwen the communitarian emphasis within Afrikanerdom encouraged

female acquiescence in structural injustice rather than calling forth any sustained Christian

resistance (Stewart-van Leeuwen, 1992). But this being noted, it still can be said that the

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possibility remains for positive policy initiatives to arise from both of these Christian

sources.

Current debate, about the reform of welfare provision, is often represented simplistically by

the media. But despite the powers exercised by contending groups to corner the discussion,

and the widespread confusion about what the issues are, the public and legal significance

of domestic and household life still needs clarification. Government respect for

homemakers and child-rearers, for homes and children, cannot be sustained in a

structureless vacuum.

Feminism is not confined to political parties and public legal debate, and the issue of

women’s place is not simply a women’s issue. If church polity excludes women from the

membership category of “voting membership” in the congregation, as some Calvinistic

denominations still do, what happens when that church discusses government policy with

respect to women, women’s rights, suffrage and the like? Will women be asked to

participate in such matters? Will the male church rulers who restrict women’s right of

access to ecclesiastical office, propose that women must follow their Christian vocation of

passivity in the political sphere as well?

This is pertinent in polities like Australia where all adults have the vote, and by law must

vote. The Presbyterian Church of Australia at its General Assembly of 1991 rescinded its

1974 decision to ordain women ministers. The ramifications for such a decision are still

being felt and go beyond the church sphere. There are long-term pastoral and pedagogical

implications for the next generation of Christian women. Some quasi-Presbyterian sects

have even taken this 1991 change to mean that women’s involvement in higher education

should be controlled by the male headship principle. Girls who have gained university

entrance have been forbidden to go on to further education.

The Roman Catholic and neo-Calvinistic traditions may have actually stimulated Christian

political reflection among women, even if such traditions constrict female participation in

the church sphere. Does a Christian woman have to leave the church, or at least become a

dissenter within it, before she can give leadership in the public-legal realm? Or to put it

more provocatively: does the church which proscribes preaching by women, or female

elders, going to advocate the abolition of women’s suffrage?

Kuyper at some points seems to imply that preachers and Christian educators will be

prevented from putting forward a Christian (organic) view of society when state laws

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demand women’s suffrage. For him, Christian women who try to do so as Christians will

be seriously misreading the pagan roots of their “forceful personality development”. This

was how he described Anglo-Saxon women reared under utilitarianism (Kuyper, 1914:4).

But does women’s suffrage have to be defended on an individualistic and liberal basis? It

may be advocated by those who confess Ni Dieu, Ni Maître, but to assert that the issue itself

is simply a liberal issue is to prevent Christian democratic politics from ever developing its

own well-rounded world-and-life-view. Still, a Christian political historiography of the 19th

century will have to explain why the utilitarians were in the vanguard of women’s suffrage.

We consider Kuyper first. The major emphasis in this article is upon Kuyper’s thinking

about women, showing how, at a crucial juncture, he seems to have accommodated the

Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity. He may have tried to extend the sphere sovereignty

principle but in asserting the male role for administering the line of demarcation between

male and female roles he advocated her subsidiarity in his sphere.

We proceed by addressing the question: how are the public offices of woman in work –

inside and outside the home – to be respected? Feminists resile from any arbitrary

separation of private and public realms, the application of any universal (and male serving)

criterion. And the meaning of the distinction between private and public still continues to

be a matter for searching discussion in the social sciences.

• 4. Abraham Kuyper – Het sociaale vraagstuk der Christelijke religie (1891) and De eerepositie der vrouw (1914).

New Zealand first, and then the Australian colonies, granted women the vote late in the

19th century. For this and other reasons, Australia and New Zealand were lumped together

by Kuyper as examples of the Anglo-Saxon imbibing of the spirit of individualism to a

degree unknown in communitarian (Germanic) Europe (Kuyper, 1914), and presumably

also in its colonies. Kuyper’s philosophy, driven by a view of Christian social freedom

(Kuyper, 1891; Hennis, 1994), seems thereby to construe the United States in

communitarian terms (Heslam, 1998) but subsequently the USA followed the Australasian

British colonies and granted the vote to women. It took longer for European countries to

follow.

Kuyper’s De eerepositie der vrouw (1914) was a series of newspaper articles on suffrage

published in De Standaard, the paper Kuyper set up decades earlier. The series was

republished as a book in 1932.

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But even less than in North America, politics in Australia and New Zealand has not been

greatly influenced by sustained Christian political reflection. Kuyper might have said that

that had to do with the pagan spirit of Anglo-Saxon feminism, which he identifies with

individualism, and he may be right to identify Anglo-Saxon individualism in this way

(Miller, 1966; Northrop, 1946; Lipset, 1963, 1989). But what is the appropriate political

response today of Christian women in those societies where a multi-cultural spirit now

holds sway? Does Kuyper’s insight have anything to say to them?

Van der Vyver has observed that Kuyper moved off his Calvinistic basis when he identified

the political and legal structure of the USA with his own neo-Calvinistic aspirations (Van

der Vyver, 1988). A recent analysis of Kuyper’s worldview makes a similar observation

(Heslam, 1998). In his inaugural pronouncement at the founding of the Vrije Universiteit in

1880, Kuyper’s principle was captured in the title of that address: “Souvereiniteit in eigen

kring” (literally “sovereignty in its own sphere” or “sphere sovereignty”). His Lectures on

Calvinism (Kuyper, 1898) developed this approach and called for a distinctively Christian

philosophy, jurisprudence, art and science.

For all its limitations, Kuyper’s neo-Calvinistic view provokes a many-sided investigation

of women’s place in religious, ethical, legal, aesthetic and economic terms. His formulation

of Women’s position of honour (Kuyper, 1914) is the formulation of the political leader of an

ascendant Dutch Calvinist working class. But if this is also evidence of a declension by

Kuyper from the principles he espoused in his neo-Calvinistic world-view, we may wonder

whether it means a reversion to a Roman Catholic view of hearth and home. Read in terms

of a Calvinist-Catholic competition over “principles” – “sphere sovereignty” (souvereniteit in

eigen kring) in contra-distinction to “subsidiarity” – their subsequent parliamentary co-

operation is ambiguous. Is this the basis for a neo-conservative Christian coalition which has

been taken up later in the century? Is this a basis upon which conservative Catholics and late

twentieth-century fundamentalists can find each other?

• 5. Christian democratic (mis-)applications

In Kuyper’s political strategies, Catholics and Calvinists stood together against

individualism and state absolutism. To explain how Kuyper accommodated the reforming

element in his own thought with the reactionary and populist notions about “women’s

place” current in Roman Catholic circles, we have to consider the theoretical alternatives to

individualism that were then presenting themselves. The corporatist and communalist

views focused upon the community rather than the abstract individual. Yet conservatism

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built on this basis also finds confessional bed-rock in Ni Dieu, Ni Maître! It is not the

abstract individual, but rather the inter-dependent community, which asserts its autonomy

in this view.

In the parliamentary debates about suffrage, Kuyper and his Anti-Revolutionary Party

(ARP) advocated a “householders suffrage” joining with the Roman Catholic Party (RKSP)

on this issue. They lost. It was not only the suffrage issue but involved industrial legislation

as well. They were part of a wider social welfare package seeking to address the “women’s

issue” and the problem of poverty. Hillie van de Streek has shown how these Christian

doctrines (subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty) were part of these early twentieth-century

Christian attempts to restrict suffrage (Van de Streek, 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Van de Streek &

Quak, 1989). So can Kuyper’s newspaper series (Kuyper, 1914) be read as the attempt to

clarify this development of his principles? Could this have been a soft male supremacist

version of “sphere sovereignty” via resort to a Roman Catholic view of societal authority?

Subsidiarity within the family means that the head of household holds sovereignty on the

basis of an hierarchic principle.

According to Van de Streek the Roman Catholic (RKSP) and Anti-Revolutionary (ARP)

policies on the family in the 1920’s and 1930’s in the Netherlands confirmed the trend in the

Kuyperian view of marital “sphere sovereignty” in the direction of Roman Catholic female

“subsidiarity”. This occurred when parliamentary co-operation brought these two Christian

parties to the joint advocacy of policies trying to restrict female participation in the work-

force.

Admittedly, this was not just an abstract opposition to “women’s rights” – it also involved

wider questions and an emergent welfare policy promoting the legal protections designed

to strengthen the social web centred in families, households and conventional marriages.

Such legislation aimed to protect women in their familial responsibilities, acknowledging

the public right of wives and mothers to choose to stay at home. In a radically utilitarian

market, as found in the English-speaking world, welfare state policies have often been

biased in terms of women’s domestic place as a private right, a market choice. But in this

respect questions about how the household is related to the economy, and how the

household is itself an economy in its own right, are raised with increasing forcefulness,

needing public clarification by policy makers. This means that when governments develop

policies about families they need to refer to an ethic of social inter-dependence which will

allow legislators to keep in mind the perplexing ethical questions about variant family and

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household forms. It would also require legislative commitment to marriage as a public

institution. So although we can now discern emergent problems in the neo-Calvinist world-

view we would not want to deny the advancement of insight that such a search for just

policies represented.

In the late 20th century these inner tensions and contradictions in Christian social thought

remain. Public controversy will always be stirred when churchmen try to ban women from

office in the church. Meanwhile the increased female involvement in public life makes it

impossible for such strategies to be consistent and advocate the abolition of women’s

suffrage as well.

When Reformed thought in its anti-individualism refers to the covenantal character of

Christian belief, it often emphasises this in association with a notion of “Christian

community”. If it fails to distinguish between its own view and romantic/ corporatist

notions, then its resultant view is problematic and can not be shown to be any more

Christian than that based upon the “sovereign individual”.

Christian social thought after Kuyper has had to try to recapture lost insight about how

Christian women contribute to the corporate inter-weaving of civil society. When

“community” has become a Christian dogma, Paul’s teaching about headship in the

marriage-bond is misread. Could this be a cause of the stunted growth in subsequent neo-

Calvinistic social and political thinking (Veenhof, 1939; Zuidema, 1972; Stewart-van

Leeuwen, 1993)?

This line of questioning assumes that the strain of corporatism in Kuyper’s neo-Calvinism

is at odds with the emphasis of the distinctive integrity of social structures Coram Deo.

Sphere sovereignty implies that men and women are answerable for all societal relations,

structures and institutions. The forms of their social life give expression in many ways to

their God-given stewardship. Men and women are created as co-labourers in society. It

follows that neither can be written out of the history of public life – either legally,

sociographically or historiographically – without violating Divine law (Exodus 20:16).

The principle of subsidiarity applied to marriage and family, however, tries to guarantee to

the husband/father authority in (his) own sphere. But when household roles in the

Christian family are considered as the common denominator, then all kinds of unexpected

analytical problems emerge: What about single women who live on their own? Do they

qualify for the vote? What about widows who have to rule the household? And what of

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people who rent, or adult friends of the same sex who live together? Are they breaking

God’s ordinances? A tension is manifested in Kuyper’s social thought, reminiscent of the

problems many Christians still have in their attempts to reflect on society.

When the roles of husband and father are merged under the “subsidiarity” principle – as

with paternal and priestly responsibilities in Roman Catholic ecclesiology – then the

relation of the husband to the wife in the marital bond loses its distinctive characteristics.

Headship, as a marital description of Christ and the church, becomes a universalistic

justification for a particular hierarchic theory about all families and households, and all

societal authority. Marital love becomes a function of family “community” and loses its

distinctiveness. Such a fusion ignores the possibility, integrity and distinctiveness of

childless marriage.

There are other serious implications for the neo-Calvinistic view of marriage. Its character

as a sexual bond between the male and female is undermined when sphere sovereignty

(qua principle) is interpreted as female subsidiarity to him in her sphere. It is either the

physical strength or sexual potency of the male that becomes the criterion of the husband’s

headship rather than the male’s calling to follow Christ and serve his wife as Christ serves

the church. The character of sexuality is reduced to a coital act, interpreted as requiring

male hierarchic initiative, rather than a bodily submission of each to the other as the

Christian scriptures so plainly teach (Ephesians 5:21).

Or to put it another way: the male, head of household, is viewed as maintaining

“sovereignty in her own sphere”. This was apparently justified to obviate the pagan threat

of individualism and feminism. But when the theory itself ascribes such public and legal

ground for exercising such control, irrespective of what the married couple decide between

themselves about the internal conduct of their marriage, we see the emergence of a new

principle for women – her subsidiarity in his own household! Ironically, it is marriage, as

such, which is lost to sight here. In his teaching about the man’s headship in the marriage

bond, Paul says it only makes sense, in the spirit of Christ’s servanthood. It is a

misapplication to apply it in a universal way to the historical form of the Christian

household and family.

• 6. Rerum Novarum (1891)

Further analysis of the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the fountainhead of modern Roman

Catholic social teaching is called for. Leo’s pronouncements led to the world-wide

movement of Catholic Action (Truman, 1960) and this spiritual crusade against state

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collectivism and capitalistic individualism has continued to this day. On the one hand, the

state is seen to extend its power, incorporating all of social life into its realm. Schools and

other independent social organisations become parts of the state apparatus. On the other

hand, the so-called freedom of the individual employer – interpreted as the freedom to

make a profit – impoverishes and controls the working classes.

... working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition ... so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself (Leo XIII, 1891:206-207 in Skillen & McCarthy, 1991:144).

The challenge then is to respect the worker and honour the authority of governments. But

how is such honour bestowed? A way has to be found to give due respect to workers and to

the state. On the one hand the state must not do for individuals and institutions what they

can do, and should do better, for themselves.

We have said that the State must not absorb the individual or the family; both should be

allowed free and untrammelled action as far as is consistent with the common good and the

interest of others (Leo XIII, 1891:224 in Skillen & McCarthy, 1991:145).

On the other hand social cohesion has to be maintained. Subsidiarity is the principle which

is appealed to when demarcation disputes arise. The distinction is made between the body

politic and the private societies that exist as parts within it. A second distinction is between

the body politic and the state. The task of the state is the public interest of the whole. The

whole plays its part in according public respect to the parts; the parts play their (own) part.

The parts cannot be accorded due respect if it is assumed that the state, as guardian of the

whole, should do for the parts what the parts should do for themselves. Each part has a

distinctive part to play, which only it can do.

This way of construing politics leads to further questions like, how is the family unit to be

construed in its political context? To answer that question we have to look a bit closer.

Individuals and institutions such as the family have rights, recognised by the state, but not

deriving from the state power. Likewise, in its own way, the church, viewed as

supernatural in origin, holds the “most exalted of all authority”.

Man is older than the State and he holds the right of providing for the life of his body prior

to the formation of any state ... thus we have the family – the ‘society’ of a man’s own

household; a society limited indeed in numbers, but a true ‘society’, anterior to every kind

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of State or nation, with rights and duties of its own, totally independent of the

commonwealth (Leo XIII, 1891:171, 173 in Skillen & McCarthy, 1991:159 ftn 9).

In this way a legislative programme based on this principle recognises the family. But what

is this “family” and how does the state (and the other social bodies) recognise it? It is

almost as if the domestic sphere, whilst viewed as private, is shaped in its outer shell, by

public policy. The inner life of the family, the domestic sphere, is beyond state competence.

The state deals with families through the “family’s head”, and in this it is clear that the

account of such authority structures is weighted in terms of male/husband/father.

Hence while the Roman Catholic version of Christian democracy is a response to the

“women’s issue”, it seeks to set a limit upon the power of the state to interfere with the

“internal life” of the family structure. It has a power deriving from its God-given duty to

ensure that the family can play its part for the commonweal. But how is it to do so?

The assumption is two-fold: on the one hand, the state is paternalist and totalitarian when it

plays its part in maintaining the social order; on the other hand, the family to be family should

be structured on the same hierarchic principle to which the state, the guardian of the body

politic, is also subject. The prejudice implicit in this view is that the state cannot do its task

aright if the hierarchic view of paternal authority is not also maintained throughout all

social spheres. Therefore the same paternalistic structure (or pattern) has to come to

expression in both family and the state. State correction and censure will be needed for the

wrongful use of paternal authority. Hard decisions will have to be made, but how?

To answer this question the role of the state in society needs to be defined. The state has its

own niche in the economy as protector of the common weal. It has a task to uphold the

body politic in a way analogous to the husband’s/ father’s subsidiary authority under God

in the household. The household, from the point of view of the body politic, is at a lower

level in terms of the common good, but it should be viewed in its own terms, subject to

God’s natural order for humanity.

In brief: the state is paternalistic. The priest is “father” in the Church, and the father in the

household acts from a position above wife and family, if not as “priest” for the family, then

as its diaconal head. And of course there is the question of how the priest of the church is

still truly the priest of the Christian household. Another related question about this Roman

Catholic social perspective concerns the father’s diaconate within the family. If the priest in

the sphere of the church forms his role according to a “paternalistic” metaphor, as a father

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of the congregation in which all are brothers and sisters, can the priestly role be a metaphor

for the father’s role in the household? Apparently not. The religious character of the father’s

household role is not readily apparent within this hierarchic system, in which church and

Christian family are closely enmeshed – but under church authority!

In its reliance upon a paternal analogy does subsidiarity underestimate the power of

paternal evil? Is not female-ness defined in passive, rather than active, terms? What of

paternal passivity? There are also other empirical implications of this world-view which

need further exploration of Catholic communities world-wide. The philosophical basis

might exclude women from public office but there is still considerable activism among

Catholic women in the public legal realm outside the church sphere proper.

Roman Catholics who work outside the church sphere without a paternalistic and

hierarchic view of the state often find themselves opposed to what is a theory promulgated

by the church. Such a theory has power to isolate confessing Christians, and maybe also

Christian husbands and fathers. Further sociological research about the feminisation of

Christianity (not only Roman Catholicism) might look again with profit at the influence of

the subsidiarist principle.

• 7. Distinctions and separations

How can Christian thought extract itself from these dilemmas? We need to look carefully at

the current debate about these issues and carefully analyse what is at stake. When feminists

deconstruct the arbitrary distinction between public and private the resultant analysis

highlights the oppressions expressed in the private sphere which stand in the way of the

expansion of female involvement in the public sphere. Some advocate technological

development in the sphere of birth control and genetic engineering as the means of

liberation from the oppressions of the private where women’s bodies are required to

conform to the male assertion of power (Firestone, 1971). Other more moderate liberals see

liberation in the market mechanism itself, fostering an ideology and ethic of diversity (Cope

& Kalantzis, 1997). Feminist theory after Foucault has not only focused upon “public” and

“private” as different and distinct realms but argues about the social construction of this

distinction-cum-separation. Some critics adopt the view that a doubly reified distinction

must operate in any attempt to distinguish sexuality from gender. Michelle Barrett has

highlighted the problem of trying to make the analytic distinction between the biotic and

the societal into a theoretical concept by which sex (as biologically defined) and gender (as

socially constructed) can be concretely separated. Human activity can try to base itself upon

25

an analytical distinction and act as if it is a concrete separation, but sexuality and gender (or

more exactly biology and culture) cannot be concretely separated (Barrett, 1988).

The prior question concerns the structure of the theoretical concept. The biotic is not formed

by its separation from the social or the cultural. The biotic concept, as a concept, is formed in

a logical opposition between the biotic aspect and all that is non-biotic. The biotic makes

sense as an aspect of our experience, fully embedded, enmeshed within an ordered

structure of experienced aspects of everyday life. It is this order in which all things

function. The same holds for social qua concept.

An attempt to enforce a concrete (policy-oriented) separation ignores the analytical

distinction between theoretically distinguishing (between two structural aspects), and

concrete policy-making (about two distinct things). In this debate about sex and gender

there is a persistent historical echo in the unresolved debate about separation of church and

state, the relation of religion to politics. The analytical distinction between sex and gender,

and any proposed concrete separation based upon the biological structure(s) of society, is

similar to the question about the separation of church and state in relation to the distinction

between religion(s) and politics. This indicates an ongoing underlying analytic conundrum

which also has a bearing upon how we think about gender in the public sphere, the public

recognition of the familial sphere and the legal recognition of various types of household as

legal and legitimate social forms. Put in these terms we begin to see that women’s place also

has to be respected in public-legal terms.

Any attempt to separate the roles of male and female in society on the basis of a distinction

between male and female, simply compounds the analytic problems, not to mention the

societal consequences of any resultant policies so based. Human persons are not things in

the way that family, church and state are societal structures. Nor is sexuality an aspect of our

experience in the way the biotic is.

• 8. Women commending the faith in all social spheres

This discussion is intensely relevant as the welfare state is dismantled. We need such sharp

analytical thinking as we try to understand the relentless “privatisation” that

“deconstructs” or unravels community life at the local level in a “frayed web” (Elshtain,

1996). To avert local welfare disasters and promote social renewal from the grass roots,

women (and unemployed men) will have to take the lead in negotiating the bitter

accusations of entrenched feminists like Stacey (1987), showing a Christian political

perspective to have concrete and positive everyday meaning for women. In such renewal

26

women will also assume leadership roles in the local and global administration of civil

society. Christian women must rise to this challenge, but it seems inconceivable without

refining the Christian theory of society, and in this sense both Kuyper and Leo maintain

their importance, historically and analytically.

Traditionally, Christian democratic thought may have allowed for women in the work-

force as an emergency measure. The response to laissez faire economics and the culture shock

of the “industrial revolution”, discussed above, tried instinctively to insulate women and

children. That legacy is still with us – in America that was the social gospel; in England and

other countries it was various forms of Christian socialism.

But such insulation policies have not helped positively to form women’s public role. A

recent account of the principle of subsidiarity puts it in these terms: “It is wrong to steal a

person’s right or ability to make a decision” (Pollard, 1996: 102). This applies “thou shalt

not steal” to the policies which form the social order. Insulation of women can also be a

process which mutes women’s public voice, steals another person’s decision-making

responsibility.

The general principle, enunciated throughout this century by successive Papal bulls, is that

those relationships and units which are “lower down” should, as much as possible, be left

to make their own decisions, and develop their own organised life on their level. If a

decision can effectively be made lower down, those higher up should get on with their own

work and not interfere with another person’s calling. It is in such a framework that Roman

Catholic social teaching addresses the question of female involvement in all spheres of life.

This may be a useful and necessary perspective for accounting for inter-dependent

responsibility within the business firm (Chaplin, 1994). However, when it becomes a basis

for a general policy about women’s involvement in all social spheres it means restricting

women’s formative contribution to the social order itself. It means redesigning the vocation

women have Coram Deo.

The subsidiarity principle in virulent form is also alive and well around the world in

contemporary politics. Government attempts to orchestrate social “reforms” are based on

the view that the role of elected governments is to “steer”, set policy guidelines for the

national (entrepreneurial) ship of state. Direction becomes the government’s task; the rest is

up to the “rowers” who are also organized into a hierarchic system where higher set “lower

down” policies about work distribution, resource allocation. The lower down do the

27

heavier work; the higher up get paid bonuses for the overall functioning of the system

(Osborne & Gaebler, 1993).

Thus when pro-marriage, pro-family policies imply such subsidiarist hierarchy, as they

often do, it becomes clear why feminists like Judith Stacey view such policies as part of

“backlash” feminism (Stacey, 1987). We have suggested above that Christian democratic

support for communitarian views is problematic. Recently there has been an important

shift within the social sciences to give greater respect to the public meaning and significance

of family life. But the Christian political defence of marriage and family needs to develop a

simultaneous critique of communitarianism and subsidiarity, not only in relation to

“entrepreneurial government” but also of the neo-hierarchical view of male authority that

is thereby implied. Structural insight, not just media victories over rights-oriented feminism

is needed. Some advocates of “pro-life feminism” (particularly among non-fundamentalist

Christians) show the influence of Christian democratic political theories, whether of Roman

Catholicism or neo-Calvinism. And further analytic work is needed, particularly political

theorising by Christian women.

Certainly Christian majoritarianism or establishmentarianism is not the answer; all

religious world-views fight for their plausibility in a market where everything (including

religion) is now bought and sold (Berger, 1963; 1993; Luckmann & Berger, 1966; Stark,

1994). Christian women can no longer leave the public defense of the faith to their menfolk.

Such a public vocation cannot be a mere return to a historical situation where women no

longer speak out or be publicly visible defending the faith. The new situation is a call to a

new obedience, for all, both women and men.

Roman Catholic renewal in church and society feeds off a rich tradition, the unintended

consequences of which have surprising results. More than 50% of American parishes are

effectively “rowed” by lay women (Wallace, 1992; Ebaugh, 1991, 1993). But reform does not

stop at the local parish. The human vocation is expressed wherever people do their daily

work. Within the social order, all social institutions contribute to the God-given variety of

human welfare in their own way, at their own historical level.

If in recent time subsidiarity was interpreted in horizontal terms in Catholic communities,

recent announcements from the Vatican indicate an emergent re-emphasis upon the vertical

dimension showing the Roman Catholic preference for male office-bearing. In a recent

address, John-Paul II makes a direct link between the need to strengthen the all-male

28

priesthood and the dangers wrought by increased lay involvement (including women) in

the running of parishes and sacramental ministry (John-Paul II, 1998).

• 9. Conclusion

Both Roman Catholic and Calvinist versions of Christian social theory dissent from statism

and individualism; they appeal to a God-given integrity for society, and in this context the

question of the mutual social inter-dependence of men and women arises with new

pertinence.

Men and women should not have to relate to each other as if the customs of gender and sex

are norms for all social relations. Men and women as colleagues, fellow workers, are never

simply potential sexual partners, or someone else’s sexual partner. Where work-place rules

are formed to consider the workplace as a quasi-domestic sphere the division of tasks may

well serve to reproduce women’s subsidiarity if not subservience. Such concrete changes to

the way workers relate to each other never come easily, but this is why male and female

must be encouraged to play their parts and proposed reforms must try to anticipate

“institutional impacts” before implementation.

If there is a common strain in neo-Calvinistic and Roman Catholic political thought it is

somewhat ambiguous. The reformed concept of the sovereignty of the social spheres, has each

structure with a limited office which societally de-limits the spheres of the other structures.

The Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity, whilst appreciating distinctive societal roles,

orders these hierarchically according to an apriori schema. Nevertheless sphere sovereignty

and subsidiarity are not restricted in application to some social structures. Societal inter-

dependence and integration are emphasised by both views. The diversity of the social order

is respected. Each kind of social institution has its own contribution to make to the social

fabric.

European Christian democracy has thereby developed Christian views of the public and

political contribution of women. Yet industrial developments are somewhat at odds with

the earlier Christian democratic advocacy of householder’s suffrage and the paternalistic

views implicit in church oriented world-views. Yet these attempts to develop social theory

in a positive Christian direction has also included the re-appraisal of taken-for-granted dogmas

about women’s place. This historical response is a powerful stimulus to further Christian

democratic thought and action also outside of Europe.

29

Clearly this has not been a discussion of women’s role in the church which is often a

shadow of that required elsewhere. Women’s work in the church sphere also has public-

political implications which the substantial literature examines (Lehman, 1985, 1987, 1994;

Wessinger, 1993; Ebaugh, 1993). Lehman’s exhaustive research and Wallace’s study

(Wallace, 1992) highlight the indirect impact which a decrease in ordained male clergy has

had upon women’s wider social role. The older romantic notion that women’s religion is

essentially private and personal is thereby challenged. But if the church would develop a

principled recognition of women’s office in the preaching of the gospel, this might also

have an immediate impact on any confessional hurdles standing in the way of Christians

organising political organisations.

In North America, the United Kingdom, “old Commonwealth” countries like Australia and

New Zealand, and, I guess, South Africa, Christian involvement in public life confronts

cognitive and cultural obstacles distinct from those faced in local churches (Hutchinson &

Campion, 1994; Manville, 1996; Burke, 1995). When a Christian social perspective is

reduced to statements of church spokespersons, which it often is, then there seems to be no

Christian approach when bishops have not spoken (Martin, 1978). These days, however,

churches increasingly rely upon women to speak and agitate publicly for social justice and

public virtue. Such a sustained movement in the ecclesiastical sponsorship of female dissent

in public indicates a significant development in Christian political thought and action. Its

political significance should be considered with care.

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